Public address systems provide notifications from one to many. In simpler forms, these systems include a standalone electronic amplification system having a mixer, amplifier and loudspeakers used to reinforce communications from a source. The communications can be distributed through a venue or building. Public address systems with a larger number of speakers are widely used in institutional and commercial buildings to read announcements or declare states of emergency. Intercom systems, which are often used in schools, also have microphones in each room so that the occupants can reply to the central office.
Using advancements in networking, the sophistication of public address systems have increased. Intercom systems began to use IP over Ethernet instead of a centralized amplifier to distribute communications from the source to paging locations in a building or campus. At each of the locations, network-attached amplifiers and intercom units are used to provide the communication function. In some applications, the individual modules can be addressable by an IP address just like any other computer on the network. Such systems are inter-connected by the networking infrastructure and allow less loss of transmission to remote locations across the Internet or a local area or campus network while leveraging the existing network infrastructure. These systems typically require multicast be enabled on the wide area network and local area network to function properly.
Nevertheless, wide area networks used within some public address systems cannot handle multicast transmissions from the source. Instead, these networks are meant to only handle unicast transmissions. Unicast transmissions across wide area networks can also be desired as to protect or keep track of the communications. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a public address system that works with such wide area networks as well as provide multicast transmission on the network segments that support it. These goals, as well as others, are accomplished by the present application which provides a solution that can be rapidly deployed and supported by the very latest unified communications platforms.